


The Waterfall

by Tierfal



Series: A Wicked Game [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coffee, Depression, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-13 21:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5717596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere between Atlas and Giles Corey, with significantly less significance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waterfall

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place immediately after the previous because actual dachshund Tierfal couldn't stop chewing on the toy.
> 
> (With love to the Berry, who is doing the best they can, and _that's okay_. ♥)

_And is it worth the wait—_  
_All this killing time?_  
_Are you strong enough to stand_  
 _Protecting both your heart and mine?_  
– "Heavy" – Florence + the Machine –

 

“All right,” Ed murmurs into his neck after a too-short stretch of a vaguely detached sort of haze of passing time.  “We should get the hell going.”

“I can’t,” Roy says.

“Sure, you can,” Ed says.  The gorgeous warmth of his body peels itself up from where it was aligned with Roy’s.  Ed clambers upright and stretches both arms high over his head; his T-shirt rides up, and Roy’s got just enough energy left to want to salivate over the tantalizing glimpse of abdomen.  “You do it every day.  I’ve seen you.”

Roy loves the way he moves.  Roy loves his hair and his eyelashes and every muscle; and he loves the steel bars inside that tapering forearm and the titanium and plastic filling in the emptiness below the left knee.

Ed’s good at filling in emptinesses.

Just not quite good enough.

“Not every day,” Roy says.

Ed reaches over and ruffles his hair, and Roy musters a scrunched-up face of protest for him.

“Today you will,” Ed says.  “’Cause I ain’t fuckin’ no quitter.”

Roy blinks at him—very slowly, like maybe that will elucidate it.  “Are you trying to blackmail me out of depression by withholding sex?”

It’s Ed’s turn to wrinkle his nose, which he accentuates with an indistinct sort of hands-crossing gesture.  “No, no—God—it was the other way around.  Like ‘My mama didn’t raise no quitter,’ only… Like, because I know you’re _not_.  ’Cause you and I both know you’re stubborn as hell.”

Sartre wrote that Hell is other people.

But it’s not.  Hell is something in you, and you can’t kill it, and you can’t smother it, and you can’t make it go away.

Roy swallows three times and forces his throat to speak, because he owes Ed that much.  “Some days it’s just so fucking hard to be anything.”

Ed grabs his hand and knits their fingers tight and starts tugging—but his voice stays soft.  “I know.  Believe me, I know.”

He doesn’t.  That’s the problem.  He _wants_ to; he’s _trying_ ; but he’s too fucking strong to understand how bleak it gets—how far the desert of existence sprawls in every direction; how meaningless it becomes when every step’s just more of the same fucking sand.  How the slingshotting shift from parched dunes under sweltering heat to the bone-dry frozen nights drains everything you’ve got right out of you; how you empty every last drop of energy simply trying to survive.  And it’s _weighty_ —the heat, the cold, the air, the world.  It gets thicker and thicker the further you go, and everything starts to hurt after a while.  Every breath, every heartbeat, every single twitch of a motion gets to be a strain—a struggle against the immensity of everything around you, pressing down and down and _down_ and crushing out every last fucking flicker of light you try to nurture inside yourself.  After a while, it’s not even that you specifically want to lie down and die so much as that you just can’t imagine any other way to get some _rest_.

“Come on, Roy,” Ed says—softly, softly, like moth wings on Roy’s skin after so many years of nothing but the cactus spines.

“I can’t,” Roy says, and he _feels_ it in every fucking anvil of a cell in his whole leaden body; every miserable muscle and every forsaken fucking impulse down his shitty, broken nerves; it’s not _possible_ —

Ed pulls harder on his hand.  “C’mon, Roy.”

And Roy makes the bad choice—the weak choice.  Roy embraces fucking failure, like he always does—like he always _is_.

He spends his last little pocket of saved-up willpower laying his arm over his face so that Ed—beautiful, _beautiful_ fucking Ed—can’t look at him.

“I can’t,” he says.  “Today I just—I can’t.  It’s too—”  Too much, too fast, too many, too immense.  “It’s too heavy.  It’s too heavy today.  And I _can’t_.”

Ed clasps Roy’s hand between his two and stands very still for a second.  Roy can feel his heartbeat—quicker than it ought to be.  Frenetic.  Roy’s wrecking him, over time.  No goddamn surprise.

“Hey,” Ed says, quietly.

Roy swallows.  “‘Hey’ what?”

Ed pulls a little harder.  “Come, Mr. Mustang,” he says, in an unspeakably atrocious approximation of Sean Astin’s quasi-Cockney accent.  “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.”

The tears come so suddenly that Roy chokes on them and makes a criminally stupid sort of noise.

“Shit,” Ed says, and the note of urgency in it strums a chord of guilt down in the churning pit of Roy’s stomach.  “Sorry—Roy—”

“It’s okay,” he says, and mostly that’s true.  Mostly tears are a good sign.  Crying is a storm, and weather fronts have contours—stages, pacing, progress.  Storms thunder and pour and clear up when they’re rained out, and the ground’s a little cleaner afterwards.

It’s the numbness that you have to worry about.  The numbness sinks into your bones until you can’t move them, and you can’t remember why you ever wanted to.

He focuses on the discrete motions required of him right now—not on the unspoken pressure of it; not on _you’ll lose this incredible man to someone who’s worth him if you keep letting yourself be such a piece of shit_.  He drags his sleeve across his eyes and draws in a shaky breath that his diaphragm mangles a little harder with the aftershocks of that first fucking sob.

And then he grasps Ed’s hand as tight as he dares and leverages himself up on the couch.

“There we fuckin’ go,” Ed says, but his smile’s gentle, and his voice is gentle, and the way he squeezes Roy’s hand almost feels satisfying.  “C’mon.  Coffee, and then… well, shit.  Maybe just coffee.  That’s enough.”

“It’s not,” Roy says, but the balance of his weight has shifted, and Ed’s hauling him off of the couch and onto his feet.

“Sure it is,” Ed says.

“You have—” He’s up, and stumbling; Ed’s arm wraps around him, and it’s incredible—how fucking _perfectly_ they link together, like they were made to fit.

But that’s just the bias in his stupid heart talking, isn’t it?  Statistically speaking, Ed could slot right into the arms of thousands upon thousands of other people—people a hell of a lot more productive than the likes of him.

“You have stuff you were going to do,” he says.  “Stuff you need to do, in lab, and… Your cells are going to die; it’s already been…” He doesn’t know how long it’s been.  Ed guides their awkward cooperative stagger into the kitchenette, but the numbers on the microwave clock are so blurry they don’t make sense.  “You’d better go.”

“Fuck my cells,” Ed says.

Roy swallows, and swallows again, and tries to push the edges of his mouth up to make it smile.

“Individually?” he asks.  “That would take a _long_ time, but if it’s what you really want, I’m willing to try anything on—”

Ed gives him a nice, theatrical glower.  “You’re gonna get your share of the coffee dumped on your dick if you keep that up.”

“How about an IV?” Roy asks.

“How about you take care of yourself?” Ed asks, yanking out a chair at the table and plunking him down into it.  “I got plans for you in the long-term.”

“Do your plans involve skin grafts for my dick?” Roy asks.

Ed’s shoulders shake with the effort of trying not to laugh as he stretches up on his tiptoes and plucks a pair of mugs off of the shelf.  Roy would like a commendation later—he’s not sure who from—for withholding commentary on the relative height of the cabinets.

“Nah,” Ed says.  “You’re just gonna have to suck it up and deal with it.”

“If I know what you mean,” Roy says.

Ed shoots him a grin that just—

That’s what it’s supposed to be.  It’s supposed to be that little flash of light, of _lightning_ , in the center of his chest when Edward Elric meets his eyes and smiles like he’s so fucking delighted that he just can’t hold it in.

That’s the point—isn’t it?  That’s the point of being alive.

Except that it’s meant to _stay_ like that.  It’s meant to be like that all the time—as a baseline, not a fluke.

Feeling like your own continued existence sounds more or less positive to you is supposed to be your default state, not the fucking exception.  Not an instantaneous flicker of warmth that dissipates again before you can try to close your hand around it.

Ed smacks a mug full of coffee down on the tabletop before him.  “Drink before I change my mind about where this should end up.”

Roy looks at him and thinks the words so hard they’re almost audible right in his heartbeat.

Ed nudges the mug a little closer.  “I mean—if that sounds okay.”

“Yeah,” Roy says, catching a handful of Ed’s T-shirt to pull him in and kiss his cheek.  “I can handle it.”

“Good,” Ed says, snagging a few fingers in Roy’s collar and pulling back—a damp brush of lips across his forehead, and then he’s released.  “If you behave, I’ll handle _you_ later.”

Roy doesn’t want to let go of him, but prior experience suggests that coffee will end up everywhere if he tries to consume it and Ed at the same time.  “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

Ed brings the sugar over, because Roy always ends up adding more after the first sip.

“You caught me,” Ed says.  “It goes both ways around, ’cause I’m gonna be here, making lewd-ass comments at you, whether you feel better or not.”

He nudges his arm in against Roy’s shoulder—which is only possible when Roy’s sitting, so hopefully he’s enjoying the novelty of it—and then leans his head on Roy’s.

Roy’s heart beats, and beats, and keeps on beating.  That’s something, isn’t it?

“Is that a fact?” he asks.

“Yup,” Ed says.

Roy sips the coffee.  Ed holds out a spoon.  Roy scoops a little more sugar in, stirs it, and sips again.

“I love you,” he says, and it starts to prickle partway up his throat, but it’s important enough to push past his tongue regardless.

Ed’s arm snakes around his shoulders again, and Ed’s face presses itself into his hair.

“Jeez,” Ed mumbles.  “I fucking love you, too.”  The arm tightens, and Ed’s mouth mashes itself against the top of his head in an approximation of a kiss.  “Drink your stupid coffee.”

Still with the soft pulsing of the mangled wreck in the center of his chest, like it can’t quite bear to quit.

“It’s not stupid,” Roy says.  “It’s the elixir of life.”

He can feel Ed smiling slightly; and then he can hear it, too: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Forgive me for blaspheming, blah, blah.”

“You might have to make it up to me,” Roy says.

The smile widens just a bit.  “I think that can be arranged.”


End file.
